It appears that there is a rash of Twitter account hijacking going on this evening. Hundreds of twitter accounts are being compromised and tweets are being posted encouraging users to make the accquaintance of a 23 year old female with a webcam…

So far over 700 Twitter accounts have been compromised in the two hours since 7pm GMT.

The message reads “hey! 23/Female. Come chat with me on my webcam thingy here www.{BLOCKED}.com.”

Search results from www.twitscoop.com

Obviously we recommend against clicking on this link, it leads to a porn webcam portal which looks to have been designed with credit card harvesting in mind. Affected users should change their password to a secure one as soon as possible (see today’s earlier blog entry for advice).

The porn webcam portal contains an obfuscated JavaScript that loads up porn related advertisments on the browsing computer. Do not visit the site, even out of curiosity.

It is unclear how the mass compromise occured, although with Twitterers willingness to enter their Twitter username and password into any number of third-party websites offering Twitter related services, the opportunities for cybercrime are many.

UPDATE: The folks over at Twitter have been busy sorting this compromise out and have blogged about it here, they estimate that about 750 accounts were compromised.

Incidentally it looks like Facebook was hit with a similar attack about a month previously.